[ Middle East News Service
Comment: The following item is taken from the Al
Jazeera website. It is however not their own report but that
of the highly reputable French news agency AFP. This news
service would not normally run such a report unless we could
confirm it from another source.

'10
buildings for every rocket'Monday 24 July 2006,
13:54 Makka Time, 10:54 GMT

The Israeli air force has
been ordered to hit 10 buildings in south Beirut - where
Hezbollah has its headquarters - for every rocket the group
fires at the Israeli port of Haifa.

"Army chief of staff
Dan Halutz has given the order to the air force to destroy
10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district (of Beirut)
in response to every rocket fired on Haifa," a senior air
force officer told army radio on
Monday.

On this occasion we can as it
is almost word for word translation of the first report I
saw in Einyan Merkazi. A Hebrew Google News search is showing
that the story was report by News First Class, Ma’ariv
and Ynet. Ma’ariv’s report refers directly to the
Dahiya neighbourhood of south Beirut. The following sentence
is in the cached version only (it being presumably being
removed by the paper for whatever reason):

Eighty building have been destroyed so
far In this neighbourhood where the Hezbollah offices,
terrorists’homes and war materiel storage site where
located. A further fifty building remain
standing.

Ynet reports that the IDF has
denied the story but that the Association of Civil Rights in
Israel is not convinced by the denial and has continued its
approach to the Defence Minister over it. (The paper does
not comment on the way ACRI was not impressed by the denial.
In recent days the patriotic Ynet would have made a
disparaging comment about it. To me it suggests that the
paper is not impressed by the denial either.
–translator)

A high-ranking IAF
officer caused a storm on Monday in an off-record briefing
during which he told reporters that IDF Chief of Staff
Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz had ordered the military to destroy 10
buildings in Beirut in retaliation to every Katyusha rocket
strike on Haifa.

The officer said that the equation was
created by Halutz and that every rocket strike on Haifa
would be answered by IAF missile strikes on 10 12-story
buildings in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiya, a Hizbullah
stronghold. Since the beginning of Operation Change of
Direction, launched on July 12 following the abduction of
two soldiers during a Hizbullah cross-border attack, over 80
buildings in the neighborhood have been destroyed.

After
the officer's remarks were published on The Jerusalem
Post website as well as other Israeli news sites, the
IDF Spokesperson's Office released a statement insinuating
that reporters had misquoted the senior officer and claimed
that the publications were false and that Halutz had never
issued such a directive.

The IDF Spokesperson's Office
later retracted its accusation that reporters had misquoted
the officer and issued a second statement claiming that the
high-ranking officer had made a mistake and was wrong in
claiming that Halutz had issued such a
directive.

*************

[The
independent Middle East News Service concentrates on
providing alternative information chiefly from Israeli
sources. It is sponsored by the Australian Jewish Democratic
Society. The views expressed here are not necessarily those
of the AJDS. These are expressed in its own
statements]

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